


Touching The Fog, Feeling The Light

by meependa (Hawkbringer)



Category: Sen to Chihiro no Kamikakushi | Spirited Away
Genre: Abandoned Work - Unfinished and Discontinued, Changing Tenses, Dreams, F/M, Gen, Japanese Culture, Light Angst, Memory Loss, Post-Canon, Spirits are not humans, an old man tending a shrine, building a shrine, chihiro's new classmates, chihiro's parents - Freeform, once you go you never really come back, sad tone
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-27
Updated: 2019-07-27
Packaged: 2020-07-20 15:00:48
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,478
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19994128
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Hawkbringer/pseuds/meependa
Summary: Chihiro comes down off the mountain, her new life none the worse for wear. But things catch her gaze, in the corners of her eyes, and she doesn't seem to be fully here... Some magics leave impressions that never fade. (Written early 2015)





	Touching The Fog, Feeling The Light

**Author's Note:**

> Starts immediately where the movie ends. Following the English dub canon, playing around with names a bit. Overall tone is a bit sad since Chihiro feels lost between two worlds, neither of which fully accepts her. Written early 2015, so keep that in mind.
> 
> I'm on Tumblr and Twitter as Hawkbringerandstubby! Come give me a shout, tell me to post more often ;)

As the car rattled away down the rocky, overgrown path, Chihiro found herself foggy-brained, wondering why she's not more nervous to move into a new house, start a new school, and completely change her life from what it had been. She noticed that her precious bouquet had, astonishingly, perked up during the time they were gone. Chihiro couldn't quite remember if she'd put the card from them in her pocket or not, but that's where she found it in any case. She said her name out loud as she read it again, some importance she couldn't quite place on its pronouncement. Like it _mattered_.

They seemed to have lost very little time on their detour - the movers were parked out front and well into the thick of their work. They asked with mild politeness about the delay, but the family's memories didn't line up. Mom said they got lost in a forest, then turned around and come back, Dad said they ate lunch somewhere he'd never seen before, but couldn't recall what they'd had or if the food had been any good. Chihiro remembered a wind-moaning train station and a wide-open field full of rocks, or sculptures of frogs or slugs... The movers shook their heads, didn't really care that much, and Dad stayed outside to help them move the couch while Mom and Chihiro lugged the smaller boxes out of the main room up to the bedrooms.

That night, Chihiro had the most amazing dream. She woke in a sweat at some ungodly hour and stared out into the clear night sky for several minutes, convinced she had seen a dragon in the sky, or a radish spirit in the giant tree, just at the edge of her window. Even sticking her head out the window to a dangerous degree only allowed her to see an extra lump in the tree's silhouette that was gone in the daylight. She didn't think to write down the details, and the dream sank beneath the waves of her memory, maddeningly out of reach when something would remind her of it. 

***

Several weeks or months later, Chihiro has settled unhappily into her new school, finding it less awful than she was expecting. She gets a reputation for magpie-ish behavior, often twisting her head to stare at things in the corner of her eye that flash away when she looks right at them. People get the feeling she isn't paying attention to them when they talk to her sometimes. Spacey, but otherwise a quiet, likable girl. Nothing in those first few weeks or months tests her mettle to the degree that anyone sees the fire in her eyes that yields to no threat.

After the first few times something slips away after she glances directly at it, Chihiro perfects the ability of looking straight ahead while paying very close attention to her peripheral vision. This is how she converses with a frog outside the school grounds after classes one day. No one is around to hear that it talks back. The margins of her notebooks fill with fairy-tale creatures, dragons and spirits and women dressed in old-fashioned clothes. The girl who sits next to her wonders why the women are always wearing _servants'_ clothes, never grand finery. But she doesn't wonder very hard - there are always more interesting things to talk about with the girls who speak louder.

One very interesting thing Chihiro discovers after not too long is that there is a very old, very small shrine near her new school. Classes end early one day due a teacher's illness, so she goes hiking into the trees, away from the main road. She finds the shrine tended by one little old bespectacled man she immediately wants to call Oji-san. But the man looks quite surprised to see her, while the Uncle from her memories, or her dreams, would have welcomed her with open arms, along with his group of small, squeaking, jumping creatures... Were they hamsters or something? She couldn't quite remember. 

Apologizing for disturbing the shrine-tender, she stumbles her way through asking how to create a traditional shrine to a river spirit. He squints at her despite his thick glasses and asks why she wants to know. Twiddling her hands and deciding on the truth, she tells him about the Kohaku river, how she used to live near it, and how it had been dammed, redirected, and the riverbed filled in with apartments. 

She waxed a bit poetic about how she loved playing there as a child, because truly, she could only remember going once - her father's brother had brought them all fishing, and Chihiro had wandered off and fallen into the river. It was her dad who pulled her, soaking wet but unharmed, out of the water, but she had the faint feeling that there was something else in the water with her, some kind spirit that had helped save her. She wanted to pay her respects by dressing up a shrine and speaking to the spirit directly, wherever it might be now that the river was gone.

The old man explained shortly, clearly wanting her to just leave, but when she asked him to write it down, her intent to actually do the ritual clear in her eagerness, the old man's wariness melted a bit and he shuffled off to find a scrap and a pen. Chihiro gratefully slides the scrap of parchment into her backpack and promises to visit again before too long. The old man points her towards the school and bows as he shows her out. 

In her new bedroom, Chihiro sets up a small box, drapes it with one of her mother's tablecloths, and follows the instructions on the scrap of paper to the letter. She bites her lip as she contemplates the candles, fearing any smoke would set off the fire alarms in this more modern apartment building, and she doesn't want to be discovered. Her parents have no reason to contact the spirit as she does. They don't need to be involved. She settles on small battery-powered candles and hopes the Kohaku River spirit will understand.

Once the altar is all set up in the corner of her bedroom, she waits for the auspicious day the old man had indicated in his instructions - he said that the best day would be several months from now, barring that, later in the month, and barring that, Wednesday. She'd been a little impatient. 

Tuesday rolls around after her weekend of taking buses to nearby towns to find some of the rarer supplies for the altar, and she realizes on the bus ride home from school, that she doesn't want to wait any longer than she has to. She wonders, once or twice, what she expects will happen when she speaks to the spirit of this river, if anything at all will change, or if she will feel incredibly foolish for wasting two weeks' worth of allowance money on a pointless altar in the corner of her bedroom. She doesn't dwell on the 'what ifs' for long. 

By the time the bus has pulled up to the top of the hill and several kids she recognizes are getting up from their seats, she has made her decision. She will light the candles and chant the summoning prayer tonight, at midnight. 

This decision carries her through another boring dinner with her parents, who simply can't believe that nothing interesting happens at school and that she'd really rather go sit in her bedroom than try out the new desktop computer in the den. Her mother wonders, a bit too loudly, once she speeds through the meal and clambers up the stairs, if perhaps she's being bullied at her new school, and whether they should call someone. 

Chihiro grits her teeth as she pulls open the door to her room, agreeing with her dad's cut-off statement of 'Chihiro can handle herself.' She isn't sure how she knows she would handle any bullies in a way that would make them into fast friends, but she does. She thinks that perhaps in that dream, she did. For the first time, she pauses, not because she has tripped, as sometimes happens, but because she wonders, very powerfully, _Then why does it feel so real?_

As she goes through the motions of getting ready for bed, she glances at the purple hair-tie she's worn for the past several... No, she realizes. When did it turn purple? It was always red. She picks it up and turns it back and forth, surprised when it catches the light. A kindly old woman's voice informs her that it is made from the thread her friends spun by hand, and the sound of spinning wheel accompanies it. Chihiro is sure it's a spinning wheel, but she's never seen a real one in her life.... Has she? Gripping the purple hair-tie in her fist, she glances at the clock and purposefully sets the alarm for midnight.

She wakes mere moments before the alarm goes off, so her hand makes contact with the snooze button almost as soon as the klaxon starts up. She carefully turns the alarm back to 6am, for school purposes, and shuffles very quietly over to the altar in the corner. 

Over the past week since meeting the old priest, she has memorized the words to chant, though she has to refer to the now-wrinkled scrap of paper by fake candlelight to recall the sequence of lifting and pouring the different sands in different bowls. Whispering the last of the words that have echoed in her head like lapping waves, she sets the bowl of water down carefully without spilling a drop and snaps each of the candles off with a grateful sigh. It's done.

"Chihiro." It's a voice she recognizes. A voice from her dreams. Is it-- She goes to turn around. "No, don't," the voice insists, putting on hand on her opposite shoulder to make her turn back to face the altar. "If you look, you won't see me. If you look, I'll disappear." 

She takes a breath to whine in disappointment, high and nasal and childish, but her lips speak before her eyebrows can even furrow in unhappiness. "Okay. I'll keep my eyes closed." She follows this pronouncement by screwing them tightly shut. 

The voice lets out a soft chuckle and the hand on her shoulder gives a squeeze before drawing away. "Good girl," the voice says quietly. Chihiro decides it's definitely a male voice, but young, maybe her age. "And you went to all this trouble, summoning me by name," he continues, slightly in awe. 

Chihiro senses, hears, a shift in the air behind her and suddenly something bumps into her knee. The boy, if that's what he is, shuffles some more and lines their thighs up, also sitting on his heels. 

"Are you Kohaku?" she asks breathlessly. That would explain why she wouldn't be able to see him if she opened her eyes, at least. 

"Yes," the voice chokes out. "Nigihayami Kohakunushi. Guardian of the Swift Amber River. It's because of you that I remembered my name. It's because of you I'm free." He places a hand on her folded knee and she puts her hand over it immediately and squeezes it.

"I did that?" she whispers, turning her head away to prevent herself from opening her eyes. "Free from what?" 

Kohaku puts his other hand on top of hers and strokes it. "I was under a spell. I had wanted to learn magic from a powerful sorceress, but she... She made me her servant," he settles on saying after a second, glossing over the more unsavory aspects of his service. "And I had no way of leaving, since she made me forget my name. But you remembered me, falling into me as a child, and when you told me what my name was, I was freed from that witch. I've been wandering the spirit world, waiting to see you again." 

Chihiro blushed fiercely in the darkness, marveling at the tale and upset she couldn't remember any of... "Yubaba. That was the sorceress' name!" 

"Yes, Chihiro," the voice said in the darkness, accompanied by another squeeze of her hand. "I'm glad you remember some of it."

"It's... It's like a dream," she replied, picturing the beautiful, lavish palace the old woman lived in, then seeing everything in shambles after an earthquake caused by... "She had a giant baby, wearing an apron. Its name was... Po?" 

"That's right," Kohaku enthused. Seeing her bite her lip, attempting to remember more, he soothed, "Don't worry about remembering it all right now. Dreams can free our memories, if we let them. Trying keeping a journal by your bed to write down your dreams in. Someday, you'll remember everything."

She nodded, eyebrows together. "Okay. But, does that mean you'll come back?" The boy bit his lip this time, which Chihiro couldn't see.

"It's...not easy for me to be here, since my river isn't part of this world anymore. That's why you can't look at me. In this world, I'm invisible. You can hear me and feel me because you called me, but.... You'll never be able to see me, here. Unless my river comes back, or..." He trailed off and Chihiro held her breath. "Unless you come back to the spirit world." 

"Come _back_? When did I go?" 

The boy tilts his head and Chihiro feels his arm move slightly as he does it. "The day you first moved here. Your parents got lost on the way here, and you stumbled into our realm. You'll learn the details in your dreams. In the end, you passed Yubaba's final test and you and your parents returned to the human world with no time lost. Did you have the first dream, the first night you slept here?"

Chihiro nods, not sure if Kohaku can see it. "Yeah. I thought it was a bad omen, but nothing bad has really happened yet, so...."

Kohaku shook his head, which Chihiro also felt, muted. "That dream was your memories sinking into your heart. And they'll always be there, Chihiro. Don't forget that."

"Mkay," she replied, a bit unhappily. Then she wondered out loud, "Do you want me to come back to the spirit world with you?" 

Kohaku pulled her hand up to his chest and pressed it against his heart. "Yes," he whispered, his eyes closing, though she couldn't see them. "Very much so." He then shook his head and settled her hand back on her knee. "But you have so much time ahead of you, Chihiro. So many happy years. You can visit there, and I can visit here, but it won't be for long."

"But-" Chihiro's scrunched up face moves his heart, but he has no option but to stand now. His time here is running out.


End file.
